Last weekend was a long weekend in Edinburgh to see some people, see some shows, attend a party and have a good time. It was a total success. I saw some good shows (Radio *****, Chris Cox ****, Aeneas Faversham ***1/2, Oxford Imps ***1/2, Improverts Final Night *****, some others), caught up with (in order) Jono, Ruth, Ruth, Alex, Gavin, Hogg…. and it gets a little fuzzy after that and had a fun time at the end of fringe party. (Though not as much fun as Vic, wink, wink)
Archive for August, 2006
A fascinating article about Piracy and Terrorism, how non-state actors are nothing new and that we need a common global view on terrorism. I’m not a lawyer and it doesn’t say how we can achieve the consensus required but certainly one possible way out of the current mess.
is something I’ll be doing in the first week of September. I’m moving from the Red Light district of Southampton to central Winchester with George and Kat. I’ll miss living with Jim and Katie but they’re moving on in adult (buying house and getting engaged respectively) ways which awaits all of us. The new house is, of course much smaller but it’s a much nicer area and closer to work. I have no doubt that we’ll have some kind of housewarming… keep your ears to the ground for news!
I miss it and you all. Still. I keep on rediscovering this fact every time I forget it and that’s happened a couple of times over the last month. I have a little time booked off at the end of August so I should be up for the last few days of the fringe. I’m looking for any reccomendations for things I should see (and book in advance) and if anyone wants to see anything on the Thursday/Friday/Saturday of week 3 with me, just shout.
Day Job
Published August 6, 2006 IBM , Tech , axis2 , webservices , websphere , wsaddressing 0 CommentsWhile the Interop. work is very much on behalf of IBM it’s in addition to my day job which has been pretty busy recently, working towards a tough deadline (we have lots of these in software development but this was an important one). We hit the date which was a good feeling and should mean that the pressure is off a bit for the next couple of weeks.
W3C WSDL Binding Interop
Published August 6, 2006 IBM , Tech , w3c , webservices , wsaddressing 0 CommentsDuring the run of the play was the scheduled Face-To-Face for the WSDL binding interop. In the end it was a virtual face-to-face meaning that we each had the day blocked out to do the work (the 2 days off the play mentioned above) but were doing it remotely. In order to test the wsaw:Anonymous=prohibited part of the specification I needed a public endpoint which the Sun endpoint could connect to. That’s not possible at work because of the firewall but is possible at home because I control the firewall. So I planned to do it from home. Disaster struck 20 mins before the kick-off call when my boradband gave up the ghost. According to the company it was being ‘upgraded’. I headed into work (more happiness that I now have a car) and we got some work done the first day (well night for me ‘cos we were working in PST for Arun). The second day the broadband was still broken so I got an endpoint installed on the vrtual server I used to have illsley.org on and now don’t use much. It was a little flakey (to say the least) but we got lots of work done in the forst 4 hours… right up until there was a (scheduled but I wasn’t expecting) network outage at work. I can only thank Arun for not assuming I was being terribly rude as I had no way of getting in touch to explain what had happened.
We’ve done a lot more work on the interop. since and it’s pretty interesting. There’s a post I’ve been meaning to write for a while about spec development that I’ll try to do soon. The reason? We’ve found problems with the spec just trying to formulate the tests!
Reason number one for not posting was Wind in the Willows, performed by the Maskers Theatre Company. It was an outdoor show with a 2 week run, two things I haven’t done before. Held at Mottisfont Abbey, with 2 performance areas (and hence technical kit), a rowing boat, a barge, a pedal powered car, a car which looks like a train and snow, there was lots for crew to do so I ran around doing it for all but 2 nights (more about them in another post) of the run which took it out of me a bit. Why? Because I had to be there by 5.30 so I was heading into work at 7.30/8.00 and getting home at about midnight. I left before some of my housemates got up and got back after they’d all gone to bed most days. Despite all the hard work it was good fun, a good show and I met a bunch of people i’d like to and will work with again. A successful first foray into hampshire theatre.
P.S. One evening the chief weasel came up to me and asked if I worked at IBM because he’d seen this site… I find it really interesting that that keeps happening in different places.
P.P.S ‘Ratty’ was a member of Edinburgh DramSoc some decades ago and knew about and was interested in the Bedlam. 
But that’s not why I haven’t posted in over a month… It’s because I’ve been very, very busy as you’ll see in the next few posts.
